Cost of repairing Peterborough’s faulty fountains last year totalled about £22,000

About £22,000 was spent repairing Peterborough city centre’s faulty fountains last year in what council officers have described as a ‘particularly difficult time’ as they struggled to keep the water feature working.

New figures show a total of £21,934 out of £27,047 spent by the local authority on the Cathedral Square fountains last year was for repairs during a summer in which it seemed the water would not stay on for any meaningful length of time.

And emails and letters between the council officers and service companies, that have been disclosed under a Freedom of Information request submitted by the Peterborough Telegraph, reveal the fraught search for a solution that ran through the summer.

Bizarrely, they also provide an insight into the cramped, awkward and even potentially hazardous conditions that confront staff when working in the underground plant room that services the fountains that were installed 13 years ago.

A council spokesperson said: “2022 was a particularly difficult year, during which officers worked tirelessly with experts to diagnose a series of faults, and this led to the fountains operating intermittently.”

That the fountains had developed a fault was discovered when an attempt was made to switch on the water for the first time last year on June 22 but they could not be made to work because of an ‘unforeseen issue’.

The correspondence shows that various faults were considered including computer software that wrongly turned the fountains off because it thought the weather was too windy, a start-up procedure anomaly or a failure to properly drain and clean the water tanks.

The latter reason was left untreated through most of the summer because a manhole cover giving access to the underground water tank was ‘warped’ and could not be opened.

An email from Surrey-based Watermetrics, which carries out the maintenance and repairs of the fountains, blames: “The Christmas Tree was placed over the lid last year and it is assumed this is what damaged the lid.”

The correspondence between the council and Watermetrics show that the first visit to the fountains was carried out on April 11 and April12 last year.

The servicing visit seems to be a straightforward one with among the main issues being 50 lights under the jets where many were full of water and some had broken glass lenses.

The team also had to ‘recommission the water feature’ which included a full drain and cleaning of two water tanks under the paving and all associated equipment in the plant room.

The warped manhole cover above the tank that was first mentioned in April then resurfaces in July in what an official heralds as ‘a lightbulb moment’ in the search for a solution to the faulty fountains.

And the writer recalls: “If you remember when we carried out the Spring opening of the water feature with we were unable to get the manhole covers up to clean out the reservoir tank.

“...it has never run reliably since so therefore I believe the problem lies in the water tank possibly being full of rubbish…”

By September there is more clarity about the cause of the problem with the fault seeming to lie with the ‘dosing system’ which needs new parts.

“It is these parts which are causing the water feature to continuously shut down as for some reason the installers have set the system in such a way that if there are any anomalies in the pH or chlorine reading the system is designed to shut down.”

But whether this is the solution may not be known until later this year as the council was advised that the best time for fitting the new parts is this March.

The correspondence also gives some insights into working beneath Cathedral Square.

Warped manhole covers were also a problem above the main access to the plant room.

But in this case it seems help was needed ‘closing the plant room access cover as the manhole lid has warped so it doesn’t align properly unless there is the weight of two people standing on it.”

The warping is blamed on heavy lorries driving over the cover.

It seems any awkward rubbish is just left in the plant room.

A representative of Watermetrics reveals how there were ‘about 80 empty chemical drums in the plant room which are probably more of a hazard than the confined space.’

Cleaning out the system can also pose hazards for staff with hypodermic needles, cigarette butts and ‘years and years of dirt’ found in drainage channels.

There was also a ‘hypodermic syringe in the pre-filter basket, it had gone through the pump impeller so was pretty chewed up.’

With repairs to the fountains so costly every year a close watch will be kept to see how they function this year.

The council budgets £18,000 a year in order to maintain and repair the fountains and running the fountains has cost the authority £280,868 from the 2010/11 financial year up to May 20, 2021.

This includes maintenance costs of at least £81,000 over the period.

A council spokesperson said: “Work to commission the fountains for the 2023 season will begin shortly, and we have spent time over the winter providing our own staff with the training and knowledge they need to resolve any operational issues ourselves as far as we possibly can.”